1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a sports draft. In particular, the invention is concerned with monitoring and predicting a sports draft during the actual draft based on a sport team's personnel needs and the best available player to meet those needs.
2. Background Information
Draft day for a professional sport is not only intense and stressful for the athletes hoping to be drafted and the sport teams hoping to select quality players, but also for the casual fan. Many casual fans like to speculate and predict the order of players selected by the sports teams by pretending to be the general managers for each team and during the allotted time for the team, make its selection during the draft.
The draft for the major professional sports, such as football, basketball, hockey and baseball, is usually televised with commentary from certain analysts and interviews of players selected. However, the commentary during the draft is based on the player chosen with the previous selection in the draft and not focused on the next selection.
Prior to the draft, numerous publications and websites attempt to predict the order in which players will be selected during the draft. For example, many publications will create a “mock draft” including their prediction on which player will be selected by which team. Other publications or websites will rank each player by position and analyze each team's needs. The rankings and analysis is one source's opinion on which college, foreign or high school player will be selected by each sports team based on personnel needs of that team. However, these publications and websites are distributed or made available a couple of weeks before the draft and, therefore, are not updated to take into account, for example, any trades, free agency signings, serious injuries to players, or poor pre-draft workouts occurring subsequent to publication. Once the draft begins, the publications and websites are not up to date regarding actual draft picks, transactions and events occurring during the draft such as, for example, trades. Therefore, these publications and websites become obsolete shortly after the start of the draft.
During the draft, the casual fan is at the mercy of numerous outdated publications and websites to keep track of the players still available in the draft. With only limited time between draft picks, fans are forced to frantically switch back and forth between numerous publications and websites crossing out players that are selected and crossing out team needs based on the players selected.
Thus, a need exists for a capability to provide real time analysis and information relating a sports draft that enables the casual fan to monitor the progress of the draft without having to frantically flip between numerous publications and websites. There is also a need for providing automatic predictions for the sports team having the current selection during the sports draft that takes into account trades occurring during the draft and that shows personnel needs and the best players still available to meet those needs.